is Professor of English Literature in the Department of International Studies of the Università di Roma Tre. His books include Conrad’s Fiction as Critical Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 1991-20082), Introduzione a Conrad (Laterza, 1991), II piacere della poesia inglese (Cuem, 2000), R. L. Stevenson: la poetica del romanzo (Bulzoni, 2001). He co-edited with Piero Boitani Ulisse: archeologia dell’uomo moderno (Bulzoni, Roma, 1998), and with Richard Dury Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) and European Stevenson (Cambridge Scholars, 2009). Aside from more than twenty essays on Stevenson, he has also written a number of essays ranging from Chaucer to Graham Greene, through Shakespeare, Coleridge, Kipling, and Conrad. Recently, he has moved into new areas of research, with three essays in Italian in which he has addressed issues combining race and geopolitics (“I documenti UNESCO sulla ‘Race Question’ e l’ambigua nascita dell’antirazzismo,” 2010), discussed the politics of contemporary literary theory (“Memoria storica e critica del presente: usi e abusi dei termini ‘multiculturalismo’ e ‘postcoloniale’,” 2012), and, in “Il mondo nuovo del romanzo 1900-1925” (2012), outlined a transnational canon in early 20th-century European literature. He has translated, among other novels, Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands, The Secret Agent and Chance, and Stevenson’s Treasure Island and The Beach of Falesá.

Professor of Genetics at the University of Florence since 1981. He has always dealt with genetic and molecular analysis of the dynamic processes of life (development and maintenance) as well as their mathematical modeling. Currently in retirement, he has not stopped designing and developing his researches while teaching a course in genetics and behavior evolution, on which he is in the process to write a book. The title of his talk will be “From bacteria to humans: evolution of behavior”, in which he will discuss about the transition from the DNA, seen as a determinant of the behaviorial evolution in bacteria, to the epigenetics (so important in plants and in animals) and the use of complex languages and cultures in the case of humans.

teaches German literature at the University of Roma Tre. His main research interests include the twentieth-century German literature and theater, cultural studies and literary theory, as well as the relationship between geography and literature. He is the author of The lost sentinel. Ernst Jünger and the Great War (Florence 1993) and The literature of German-speaking Switzerland (Rome 2001). Among other things, he edited the volumes Topographies of literature (2007), Atlas of German literature (2009), Cultural icons of Europe (2009), Beyond the text. Literary criticism and cultural studies (2011), Figures and forms of cultural memory (2011). He was visiting professor at the University of Frankfurt, DAAD fellow at the same University and Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. He edits the series of Cultural Sciences at the publisheing houses Quodlibet, welTheatro and L’orma.

is currently lecturer in Sociology of Communication at the University of Roma Tre where he teaches courses on digital edition, new media theory and digital philology. His research and main publication focus on the impact of new media on the representation and transmission of cultural artefacts. In 1996 he created at the University of Edinburgh the Digital Variants Archive (http://www.digitalvariants.org), an online resource on contemporary Italian and Spanish authors. Between 2007 and 2009 he coordinated the Roma Tre research unit of the national research network (PRIN) “Content Organization, Propagation, Evaluation and Reuse through Active Repositories”. He has edited or co-edited three collections of digital humanities texts: New Media and the Humanities: Research and Applications, Oxford, Oxford University Humanities Computing Unit, 2001; Informatica umanistica: dalla ricerca all’insegnamento, Roma, Bulzoni, 2003; La macchina nel nel tempo. Studi di informatica umanistica in onore di Tito Orlandi, Firenze, Le Lettere, 2011. His is also author of Scrittura e filologia nell’era digitale (Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), and in 2010 has published with Teresa Numerico and Francesca Tomasi an introduction to digital humanities: L’umanista digitale, Bologna, Il Mulino. With Paolo Sordi has founded in 2000 the first Italian blog on digital literary studies: http://www.infolet.it/

is an Italian literature professor at the DAMS of Roma Tre. She is the author of numerous essays on mystical writers of fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She wrote on Ariosto and the culture humanistic Renaissance, on Italian writers of the modern era and the problems of periodization that their presence poses to the canon of Italian literature. She was on the editorial staff of “RRromanelrinascimento” and “DWFdonnawomanfemme” and she is one of the founders of the Italian Society of Women Scholars and is part of the Summer Residential Seminar held by SIL; a research group active since 2000 dedicated to themes such as “The literary canon and female writers” “Bildungsroman and stories of training”, “Forms of happiness “, ” Excess and measure”. These seminars resulted in a series of volumes known for their innovative cut such as Critical movements of happiness. Histories, structures and figures of desire, by Donatella Alesi and Laura Fortini, Rome, manifestolibri, 2004, and The novel of becoming. A Bildungsroman of women? edited by Paola Bono and Laura Fortini, Rome, Iacobelli, 2007. Together with Vita Cosentino and the Autoriforma Gentile group supervised the publication of the book Language as a common good, Enna, Open City, 2006. With Paola Pittalis, she is author of the volume I solitudine. Male and female writers of Sardinia, Rome, Iacobelli, 2010 and edited with Mauro Sarnelli Voices and female figures. Forms of self-representation between past and present (conference papers: Sassari 22 to 23 October 2008), Cosenza, Pellegrini, 2012.

is a teacher and a researcher in Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature at Roma Tre University. He has published three volumes as author: Sconfinamenti d’autore (Pisa 2002), Letture marginali (Napoli 2007) and Patria e lettere (Roma 2012), two as editor (about Eugenio Montale’s poetry in 2007 and 2008). Many of his articles have been published in Italy, France, United States, in academic journals and literary reviews such as il Verri, Narrativa, La Poligraphe, Gradiva. His interests in Comparative Literature has lead him to various fields of studies: he focused on postcolonial, visual and gender studies, as well as in Italian migration literature. He is now planning a monograph on the Italian contemporary novelist Gianni Celati.

Directeur de recherche CNRS Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) since 1990 (previously, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pisa), As logical mathematician, he has extended his interests from the foundations of mathematics and computer science to those of biology. His research group “complexité et information morphologiques “ (CIM) is concerned with theoretical problems of interface between mathematics, physics and biology. His talk will focus on the differences between life sciences and physical sciences related to the categories of causality and time. The role of irreversibility in the life sciences and the interaction between a multiplicity of elements in the production of effects make the above disciplines very difficult to compare with the physical sciences, whose principles are, instead, based on the repeatability and the reversibility of the analyzed phenomena.

Is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University Roma Tre, Italy. His research focuses primarily on issues in the philosophy of biological and psychological sciences, on which he has published five books and many journal articles and book chapters.

(PhD in History of Science) is assistant professor in logic and philosophy of science at the University of Rome3, where she teaches history and philosophy of computer science and epistemology of the new media. Among her publications: a volume on Digital humanist (with D. Fiormonte e F. Tomasi, Mulino, 2010) a book on Alan Turing and machine intelligence (FrancoAngeli 2005) and a book on search engines, Web dragons (with I. Witten and M. Gori, Morgan Kaufmann 2007). She was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship in 2004-2005. Her research interests range from philosophy of computer science to social informatics, from ethics to politics of telecommunication technologies.

is Ph.D. in Comparative Cultures and Literatures at the University Roma Tre. He studied and researched in Germany, in Berlin and Weimar. His research topics concern the literary dynamics of the German eighteenth and twenty first centuries, the science of culture and media theories and practices. He published essays on the Mitteleuropean literature, on Goethe, Lessing, Nicolai, Kleist, Kafka, on the masonic background of the European Enlightenment, on the German expressionist cinema. He is in the editorial staff of the literary magazine “Cultura Tedesca”.

is a PhD in English and American Literature at La Sapienza University of Rome. Awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2011, she was a visiting researcher at the Stanford University (CA) and at the department of Digital Humanities at the UCL (UK) where she completed her dissertation on the computational analysis of the gothic genre. Her main research interests regard the application of digital humanities’ tools for literary corpus analysis, the mechanisms of evolution of literary genres, the role and the perception of “Italy” in foreign literary systems. She gave several talks about the presence of Italian location in the British Novel (the Harvard Graduate Conference for Italian Studies – March 2011 – and Transnational Italy SIS Reading – July 2012 – ) and about the future perspectives of Digital Humanities in Literary Studies at the first Italian conference for Digital Humanities (October 2011).